Harvard Computer Science Technical Reports for 1999

Proportional-share resource management is becoming increasingly
important
in today's computing environments. In particular, the growing use
of the
computational resources of central service providers argues for a
proportional-share approach that allows clients to obtain resource
shares
that reflect their relative importance. In such environments,
clients
must be isolated from one another to prevent the activities of one
client
from impinging on the resource rights of others. However, such
isolation
limits the flexibility with which resource allocations can be
modified to
reflect the actual needs of clients. We present extensions to the
lottery-scheduling resource-management framework that increase its
flexibility while preserving its ability to provide secure
isolation. To
demonstrate how this extended framework safely overcomes the limits
imposed by existing proportional-share schemes, we have implemented
a
prototype system that uses the framework to manage CPU time,
physical
memory, and disk bandwidth. We present the results of experiments
that
evaluate the prototype, and we show that our framework enables
clients of
central servers to achieve significant improvements in performance.